The canning or packaging of various fruits in ready-to-eat sections or slices is well known in the art and has been practiced for several decades both in the United States and in other countries. In fact, in about the 1930's, fruit canning began in the United States and was subsequently expanded to include the sectioning and slicing of fruits and the packaging of the fruit in containers and for being maintained under refrigerated or chilled conditions in order to provide fresh fruit sections and slices.
When this industry began in the United States, most of the operations on the fruit for peeling and sectioning the fruit was achieved by hand labor. Since the cost of hand labor, at that time, was reasonably priced, the fruit could be processed in this manner. However, as hand-labor costs increased, efforts were expended in automating the peeling and sectioning of the fruit. This activity resulted in several automated fruit scoring, slicing, and coring machines to be developed.
In spite of these efforts to develop equipment for automating the peeling, seed removal, sectioning and/or slicing of fruit, these efforts were not successful and most of the fruit processing business became dominated by production in foreign countries where labor was substantially less expensive than in the United States. This ultimately resulted in most of the fruit processing business in the United States being terminated. Presently, only a handful of processing plants remain in the United States, with foreign competition continuing to exert substantial pressure on the ability of these U.S. manufacturing facilities to produce fruit sections and slices at competitive prices.
Therefore, it is a principal object of the present invention to provide a unique method and apparatus for processing fruit in a highly efficient and low cost manner.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a unique method and apparatus for processing fruit having the characteristic features described above which is capable of being employed in a substantially fully automated manner, with a minimum of hand labor requirements.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a unique method and apparatus for processing fruit having the characteristic features described above which is capable of automatically removing and separating the outer skin and seeds form the edible fruit portion and transferring each component to separate receiving zones.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a method and apparatus for processing fruit having the characteristic features described above which is capable of producing fruit slices or sections with production yields substantially greater than any other prior art method or system.
Other and more specific objects will in part be obvious and will in part appear hereinafter.